John Eckman has done a second annual post on what the WordPress community can learn from Drupal. It’s quite good, and quite thorough.
Here’s his tl;dr version, but the whole post is certainly worthwhile:
What can the WordPress community learn from the state of Drupal?
- The Drupal Association, which organizes DrupalCon and promotes Drupal adoption via marketing and developer outreach – offers a model for the potential evolution of the WordPress Foundation
- Outreach is critical. We can’t just speak to the WordPress community but need to reach out to potential users/customers and sell the benefits of the platform in a language they understand
- A willingness to experiment – with fundraising approaches, with the hiring of paid teams to supplement the open source core project (Mark Boulton design’s work on Drupal 7 for example) – has helped the Drupal community move forward. This doesn’t mean all those experiments would work for WordPress, but we should be open to new approaches
- The potential for organizational and client attribution on contributions is an interesting idea for rewarding companies who give back – though with caution about unintended consequences in terms of motivation
- There are benefits to the epochal release cycle from a marketing point of view – differentiating the old platform from the new. I don’t think WordPress should change to a four year re-architected platform cycle, but we should be doing a better job of articulating the more complex platform WordPress is today
Check it out on his blog.
